The "denouement" of "empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind"

W ilfrid Sellars spoke of section 59 of his classic paper, "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" (Sellars 1997, first published as Sellars 1956), as the denouement of the myth of Jones, the story about "bur Rylean ancestors" (1997, p. 90) that occupies the last part of that paper. Sellars's myth aims to show humans limited to a language with a vocabulary that speaks of "public properties of public objects" (1997, p . 91) could learn to speak of inner episodes and immediate experience. By section 58, Jones, the protagonist of Sellars's anthropological science fiction, has developed a theoretical framework that allows him to explain the behavior of others in terms of "thoughts": postulated linguistic entities, modeled on overt utterances, but akin to the particles of physical theory in that they are theoretical, not observational .